First Rolling Release ISOs Available

Kris has announced the availabiity of the first rolling release:

As a few of you have already noticed, we have some new ISOs now up on the mirrors.

These are the first images built of PC-BSD Rolling Release, based upon FreeBSD 9.1-RELEASE, which use PKGNG as the backend for keeping your desktop and base-system packages up to date. You are welcome to download and give them a spin if you want to help us beta-test them.

They include updated packages from about 2 weeks ago, which includes KDE 4.9.5 among others. Our build server is still finishing up building the entire package repository and I hope to have all ~20,000 pkgng packages online in another week or so, with weekly updates after that. The weekly updates will include all the latest PC-BSD / TrueOS utilities, so you can expect to see much more frequent bug fixes & enhancements.

For users running on the original PC-BSD / TrueOS 9.1 release, I also have an online system update in the works. This update will convert your existing install to PKGNG and allow you to start tracking the rolling release, the same as if you installed a fresh copy from our new ISOs. Once I’ve finished a bit more testing & bugfixing with it, I will post back with details on how to try it out. I’m hopeful it will be sometime next week.

Lastly, I also wanted to let you know that with this change, it will be possible convert an existing “FreeBSD” 9.1-Release into a PC-BSD or TrueOS system. I’ve started writing instructions on this PC-BSD wiki page with details.

Last but not least, we have some new hardware coming in soon which I will quickly get working on building a PC-BSD –STABLE release, and then –CURRENT. More details as they arrive

Happy testing, and please post your feedback to the testing mailing list so we can get to work quashing bugs.

1) Is this warning from the PC-BSD handbook still valid for the “new” PC-BSD:

“NOTE: users are highly discouraged from using FreeBSD packages or ports or upgrade tools such as portupgrade or portversion from the PC-BSD® command line as Update Manager will remove your manually installed applications and upgrades.”

Because this was the main reason for not using PC-BSD until now. PC-BSD has many nice things, and there are cases where PBI are useful but I still want to be able to install and remove FreeBSD packages with pkg or from ports without them being removed by a PC-BSD upgrade.

2) I understand that now one can switch from FreeBSD to PC-BSD but will it be possible to switch back by for example changing the packagesite back to the FreeBSD one and running an pkg upgrade?

We can change this warning. Packages will be allowed, and I will even be working on a GUI front-end to them. However we still have to put out the caveat that packages are more dangerous than PBI’s, and if you remove the wrong thing you can end up breaking your desktop.

It was time that BSD systems while maintaining standards of offering the ultimate in desktop applications. I support this initiative and I congratulate them for their hard work. Now to win the community ..

Thanks so much for the very good work. I have a problem with nvidia-driver, don’t want to install, it’s saying that it’s in conflict with linux-f10-dri and stop installing. The same thing with pcbsd-meta-nvidia.
I hope to use my nvidia because nv driver is very slow.

Kris came across a showstopper in the upgrade which he has now fixed. The upgrade should be available in the next day or so. If you install from ISO, the upgrade will show up in Upgrade Manager once it is available. If you have not installed yet, you can install from a rolling release ISO and future upgrades will also be available.

Any updates you can give on the progression of the rolling release ISOs and packages? I ask because I was going to give it a go this weekend. It seems to be right in the time frame that Kris said “I hope to have all ~20,000 pkgng packages online in another week or so“
–Thanks

Indeed. I’ve never got around 1.5Mbps even from country mirrors, now ISO can be fetched for less than an hour. And PBIs also seems to be downloaded faster, than before.
As for reliable, gimp 2.8.6 from PBI can’be installed (after update to CDN?) on 9.1-RELEASE amd64. I was going to report this on forum, but have found that someone already reported this: http://​forums​.pcbsd​.org/​s​h​o​w​t​h​r​e​a​d​.​p​h​p​?​t​=​2​0​177.